2014 Active Living Research Conference

Theme: Moving Active Living from Niche to Norm

“Active living research has gone from a small niche of investigation to the mainstream of research, and it is definitely influencing policy and practice. However, active living environments and policies are far from the norm, and that’s where we need to be if we are going to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic and reduce risk of chronic diseases.”– Jim Sallis

At the conference this year, Andrew Kaczynski gave an oral presentation entitled “Disparities in park availability, features, and characteristics by social determinants of health within a U.S.-Mexico border urban area.” You can see the presentation here.

Gina Besenyi gave an oral presentation entitled “Youth advocacy for policy, systems, and environmental changes for healthy eating/active living: Pilot evaluation of the Health Young People Empowerment (HYPE) Project”. You can see the presentation here.

Gina also gave a poster presentation entitled “Park Hop: An inter-agency collaboration to promote park visitation and physical activity in Greenville, SC” that highlights our collaboration with the LiveWell evaluation team for the For Fun Group. You can see the poster here.

Stephanie Child gave two poster presentations entitled “Examining demographic interactions in perceptions of outdoor recreation areas across a decade” and “Environmental influences on health-enhancing social interactions: Associations between perceived neighborhood attributed and social environments.”

While at the conference, the BEACH lab had a chance to network with other researchers and professionals.

Sonja Wilhelm StanisUniversity of Missouri

Doctoral students network at lunch

Mike EdwardsNC State University

Practicing what we preach, we also had a chance to take advantage of our environment to participate in physical activity opportunities provided by the conference.